Everyone knows who Altman Lighting is (at least I would hope) – you just haven’t lived if you’ve not burned the crap out of your fingers on a 360Q or 65Q fixture in your lighting lifetime. Well, to heck with that – Altman and a company called Future Lighting Solutions have developed some 4-channel LED fixtures (RGBA) that claim to be capable of producing 281 trilion different colors. It is rumored but not proven that the human brain can only distinguish from between 20,000 and 16 million colors, so the color combinations here are – well, they’re ridiculous. One could say that now we have to come up with some way to upgrade the eye.
The Spectra fixtures (both cyc and PAR) use a set of Luxeon Rebel LED engines for the RGBA system – Altman wanted to create a non-stock system that could be tailored to their needs and specs – on the shelf systems were available in limited configurations. From a press release at Future Lighting Solutions:
Until the release of the Spectra CYC 100 and Spectra PAR 100, however, Altman built its solid state fi xtures with off -the-shelf light engines that were available only in a limited number of confi gurations. That was the challenge the company faced in 2008 when it recognized the opportunity to use a then-new, higher output LUXEON Rebel amber LED to raise the color bar.
“We wanted to build four-channel luminaires with the addition of amber LEDs to give lighting designers more range of dynamic colors, better color rendering, and better control in the warm color range that is a favorite in the theater for skin tones, but only RGB light engines were available,” said John T. Ryan, Director of R&D for Altman Lighting. “We realized we would have to develop our own solutions from scratch.”
The Spectra CYC 100 unit claims to have as much output as a 1000W quartz Focusing CYC unit, with a patent-pending LED lens and asymmetrical reflector like a conventional CYC. The Spectra PAR 100 uses interchangeable “true PAR” lenses (VNSP, NSP, MFL, and WFL) with a “scalloping effect with the medium and wide lenses that is not available from any other PAR or LED product.”
Altman says it’s working on an RGBW (RGB+white) model as well as an outdoor model of the CYC unit. I am interested to see some SPDs of these units – I have to see the breakdown of wavelength on these puppies!
Thanks Kati!
I’ve heard the Spectra CYC has some pretty impressive output. I’ve been meaning to get a demo for a couple months. As a side note, if the SpectraPAR needed more kudos, it’s the LED unit of choice for the Disneyland parade lighting poles. There are over 40 installed in the park along the parade route as of last year for the “Celebrate! A Street Party” parade.
That looks promising. Smart more to go with the Amber LEDs over White.
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